For release: 04/08/25
Today’s boogeyman is Elon Musk
By Cal Thomas
Tribune Content Agency
As a child I frequently visited relatives in southern Indiana. A great uncle tried to keep me from exploring his cellar (as they were called then) by telling me the boogeyman was down there and would “ get you” if I descended the stairs. It worked.
Boogeymen are nothing new. They have existed in the form of politicians going back to the founding of the country. See how Thomas Jefferson and John Adams described each other. One politician says if his opponent is elected, or his party gains a majority, the country will be destroyed. The other says the same about the other person and party. That has worked well, especially for Democrats, who for decades have won votes from scared seniors by falsely claiming Republicans want to destroy Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
The latest boogeyman is Elon Musk. Within my short memory, Musk was hailed as a hero for developing Tesla which was going to save the planet. If you wanted to send a virtue signal, you bought one. Now, if you want to send a virtue signal, you get rid of one, or other virtue signalers will vandalize, even destroy the cars and attack Tesla dealerships.
This is about the Establishment holding onto power and their misspent money, nothing else. Some Democrats, who have no policies other than opposition to President Trump, are trying to recover a level of respectability by agreeing there is waste in government, but they want Congress, not Musk and his DOGE team to cut it. This is known as allowing the people who created the problem to provide the solution, which is not likely to happen.
People who choose to serve their country in the military or in public service when they could be making more money in the private sector were once admired and held up as worthy of emulation. John F. Kennedy encouraged that spirit in his 1961 Inaugural Address: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”
Musk and DOGE are exposing what many Democrats and some Republicans have done to waste our money over decades. “The era of big government is over,” declared President Bill Clinton in his 1996 State of the Union address. It wasn’t. While Clinton cut 377,000 federal jobs, Presidents Obama and Biden added to the government employment rolls. The federal government is the largest employer in the United States.
On March 27, Musk and some of his DOGE associates were interviewed by Bret Baier of Fox News. Everyone should watch that interview. If you are not outraged by what you hear, you are part of the problem. Here is just one of many examples of the waste and fraud they have uncovered.
Musk: “(fraudsters) steal people’s Social Security … they call in (and) claim to be a retiree, and they convince the Social Security person on the phone to change where the money’s flowing. … This is happening all day every day, and then somebody doesn’t receive their Social Security. It’s because of all the fraud loopholes in the Social Security system.”
Baier: “How do you reassure people that what you all are doing is not going to affect their benefits?”
Musk: “No. In fact, what we’re doing will help their benefits. Legitimate people as a result of the work of DOGE will receive more Social Security, not less. I want to emphasize that. As a result of the work of DOGE, legitimate recipients of Social Security will receive more money, not less money.”
There are numerous other examples of misspending. Look them up and don’t take what Democrats and much of the media are saying as the truth. It isn’t.
Many members of Congress may give lip service to cutting such misspending, but the question is: will they do anything about it? Those TV ads that try selling us stocks and injury lawyers contain very small print that says: “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” With Congress, it seems like it is. They are the boogeymen (and women) in all of this.
Readers may email Cal Thomas at [email protected]. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).
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